Screed leaned forward, his elbows on the table. “Okay,” he said, “so Hoffmann helped you with the phony funeral. I read the rest of it in the papers. All to fool your son.”
The colonel took hold of the napkin and crushed it in his hand. His voice cracked as he said, “Leopold. My boy!”
“Easy now,” Screed said, looking to make sure Unwin was getting it all down. “What about your second death?”
The colonel dropped the napkin onto his plate. “Hoffmann betrayed me. He was the one who contacted my brother, told him where I was, what I’d planned. Reginald came to stop me, to claim my treasures.”
“You killed him,” Screed said. “You stabbed him with that dagger, eight times.”
“What a bore he was. How dreadful to see living boredom spilled from lips identical to yours. Forget the war, forget our childhood on the hilltop. Forget the hedgehog hunts; I despised them! Where was that, where?”
“You fled,” Screed said, trying to keep him on track.
“I was dead again, and a murderer besides. I went to City Park, to that old fort. It pleased me to go there sometimes, in the autumn. I took my son, once, to show him the view from the battlements.” The colonel chuckled to himself and drummed his hands against the edge of the table, as though to beat out the march of an approaching regiment.
Screed was at a loss. He sipped from his drink again, shaking his head.
“Sivart found you,” Unwin tried. “You fled to the bridge.”
“No, not to the bridge! To Hoffmann, to that carnival sideshow. He was in his tent at the fairgrounds, looking smug. There was a party going on. He invited me in, introduced me to the other guests. I remember there was a man who stood no taller than my knees, and some lascivious acrobats, and a woman with a hairless cat on a leash. I hated them all and showed them my teeth. He took me outside, sat me next to a fire, gave me a glass of brandy. I told him not to put on airs—anyone could see how lowly and mean were his circumstances. They say a magician never reveals his secrets, but out of spite he told me how he had encompassed my ruin.”
“They found your coat in the river,” Screed said.
“My son!” the colonel cried again, taking up the napkin and twisting it. “Greenwood found him. She was still working to finish Hoffmann’s trick.”
The man with the blond beard had come back into the restaurant, his napkin still tucked in his collar. He took in the scene instantly and came toward them with his beard thrust forward.
“Poor, poor Leopold,” the colonel said. “He thought his father was dead. Everyone suspected him. Greenwood found him and told him he was done for, gave him my old coat to wear. There was no escape for him. A little lion, my son, he always was. He put the coat on. I should have been the one to go to the bridge. Not he!”
“Stop this!” cried the man with the blond beard. He grabbed Screed by the shoulder. “You must end your investigation, close the case. Orders from up top.”
The three older gentlemen at the other table were looking around, troubled by all the noise but blind to its source. They spoke nervously in streams of inexplicable digits, their voices rising.
The colonel said, “Hoffmann would pose as my son, you see. It was the simplest of tricks for the master illusionist. I was dead, my brother was dead, and he would inherit everything. My collection, my home—he was going to throw nice parties there, he said. Not so lowly and mean anymore. He said he would drink brandy at my fireside.”
The man with the blond beard circled the table and tried to snatch Unwin’s pencil. Unwin kept hold of it until it snapped in two.
“He let me keep one thing,” the colonel said. “Any one thing of my choosing.” He withdrew the antique service revolver from his pocket. It shone from constant polishing and was worn to perfect smoothness, like an object come back from the sea. It was the brightest thing in the room.
“Cease, desist!” shouted the man with the blond beard, lunging at him.
The colonel responded to these words as though to a battle cry. He growled and locked arms with his adversary, spittle flying from his lips. Neither of the men was very strong; they circled one another in a jerky dance, the colonel straining backward to keep the beard from brushing his face. He fell, and the man with the blond beard fell with him. Then came the shot.
Colonel Baker rose to his knees. He took hold of the edge of the table and pulled himself up. The man with the blond beard remained on the floor. His teeth were chattering. It sounded, Unwin thought, like coins falling through a pay phone.
“Just the one thing,” the colonel said. The old service revolver was still in his hand. He looked surprised to see it there. “I took only what I needed.”
Screed had his pistol out, but there was nothing he could do to stop the colonel from turning the gun on himself. Unwin looked away just before the shot that signaled the fourth and final death of Colonel Baker.
Screed dropped his pistol on the table and picked up the napkin. He put it to his face and breathed quickly, making little sounds into the fabric. A minute later he put the napkin down and drank his whiskey sour. When that was gone, he started drinking Unwin’s.
Unwin stood with his back against the restaurant’s dappled green wallpaper. He could not remember when he had risen from his chair. Screed was saying something to him, but Unwin could only see the detective’s lips moving. Gradually his hearing returned.
“You were telling the truth,” Screed said. “About Sivart’s cases.”
On the floor the man with the blond beard had stopped chattering.
“Yes.”
“I don’t want the cases,” Screed said. “I want Enoch Hoffmann.”
Unwin allowed himself a few more breaths, taking time to think that over. “And in exchange you’ll let me go.”
Screed’s mustache twitched, but he said, “Yes, I’ll let you go.”
A plan was forming in Unwin’s mind. It was full of holes, and he did not have time to check it against the recommendations of the Manual. Still, it was all he had. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll make the arrangements.”
“What do you need?” Screed asked.
“I need my alarm clock.”
Screed fished it out of his jacket and thrust it at him, its alarm bell jangling.
“Go to the Cat & Tonic at six tomorrow morning,” Unwin said. “Go to the room that was Colonel Baker’s study and wait.”
“Why?” Screed asked.
“Hoffmann will be there, and he won’t be ready for you. You have to wait for the right moment, though. You’ll know it when it comes.” It was the sort of bold statement Sivart would have made in order to buy himself more time. Sometimes the detective delivered, sometimes he changed the rules enough that his promise no longer mattered. Unwin would be lucky, he thought, if he managed to survive the night.
He put the alarm clock in his briefcase and left through the front door. In the alley he found his bicycle chained to the fire escape, right where he had left it the night before. He had been correct about one thing. The chain would need a good deal of oiling.
SEVENTEEN
On Solutions
A good detective tries to know
everything. But a great detective knows
just enough to see him through to the end.
Unwin walked his bicycle toward the street but found the Gilbert’s bellhop at the entrance of the alley, blocking his way. The boy stood under a broad black umbrella. He held it out to Unwin and said, “This was in lost and found. I thought you might need it.” The boy’s voice was perfectly clear, but his eyes were half closed and unfocused.
Unwin approached slowly, then ducked under the umbrella with him. “Tom,” he said, reading the name tag on his red jacket, “what makes you think I need this more than anyone else?”
Without looking at him, the bellhop said, “It’s a long ride from here to the Cat & Tonic.”
Unwin felt suddenly colder. In spite of himself, he stepped back into the rain, rolling his bicycle with h
im. He remembered his vision of that morning—the game at the cottage, Hoffmann’s blank stare: The magician could be anyone.
“Tom, how do you know about the Cat & Tonic?”
The bellhop frowned and shook his head, struggling with the words. “I don’t,” he said. “I’m just the bellhop. But Dad says I might get promoted to desk clerk if I keep my head screwed on straight.”
While the bellhop was talking, Unwin began to circle slowly around him. But Tom grabbed his wrist and held him there. The boy’s grip was strong. “I don’t know anything about the Cat & Tonic,” he said. “But I’m good at getting messages to people.”
“You have a message for me? From whom?”
Unwin could see the boy’s breath as he spoke. “She’s on the fourteenth floor right now, asleep with her head on your old desk. Mr. Duden is trying to wake her, and he might succeed soon. In the meantime she and I are in . . .” Tom trailed off, frowning again. “We’re in direct communication.”
Unwin looked around. He saw no one on the street, no one looking down from the windows above. He moved back under the umbrella and whispered, “Direct communication? With Penelope Greenwood, you mean.”
“No names,” Tom said. “Don’t know who—”
“Don’t know who might be listening in,” Unwin said. “That’s fine, Tom. But what’s the message?”
“She and her dad are in the mist. No, the midst. Of a contest of wills. She’s trying to stop him. She says she’s on your side.”
“But I saw their reunion,” Unwin said. “Her father said they would work together. He said it wasn’t the first time.”
Tom tilted his head, as though his ears were antennae and he was trying to improve reception. “She was eleven years old on November twelfth. He . . . conscripted her.”
“Into what, exactly?”
Tom closed his eyes and breathed slowly, swaying a little. A minute passed, and Unwin thought that he had lost him, that the connection to Penelope—whatever its nature—was broken. Then the bellhop said quietly, “Her father is no puppeteer. But she had another teacher. From him she learned to . . . to let herself in, but also to leave things behind.”
“What sorts of things, Tom?”
“Instructions,” he said.
This was the part of Hoffmann’s scheme that had boggled Edwin Moore that morning. The magician did not know how to plant suggestions into a sleeping mind—but his daughter did. Caligari had taught her how.
“Instructions,” Unwin repeated. “To get up in the night and cross tomorrow off your calendar. Or to steal your neighbors’ alarm clocks. Or worse, to abandon all sense and help turn the world upside down.” Unwin gestured toward a man who had exited the hotel with a suitcase. He was going along the sidewalk, leaving his clothes draped over everything he saw. He had already dressed a letterbox and a fire hydrant. Now he was trying to button a jacket around a lamppost.
“She says that’s not her doing,” Tom replied. “They went together through the sleeping minds of the city last night, and she did what he asked. She opened up their deepest selves and jammed them open. But she made sure you and everyone at the Agency were left alone. And in some people she planted the . . . seeds of resistance. A limin . . . a liminal . . .”
“A liminal directive,” Unwin said, recalling the words of the underclerk in the third archive: something to do, someplace to go. So the sleepwalkers Moore had gone off with were special operatives. But they were working for Penelope Greenwood, not Enoch Hoffmann. “She tricked him, then. But what was the directive? What were her instructions?”
Tom tightened his grip and shook Unwin’s arm. “You have to stop him, Charles. Her father’s onto her, and she doesn’t have much time.”
“What about Sivart?”
“There’s barely anything left of him.” Tom was looking directly at Unwin now, his eyes nearly open. “He’s been broken. None of us can help him.”
“I have a plan—”
“There isn’t time. Get back to the Cat & Tonic, quickly. Finish this.”
The bellhop thrust the umbrella at him, and Unwin took it, but Tom left his arm extended, hand palm up. A moment passed before Unwin realized that the boy was waiting for a tip. He fished a quarter out of his pocket and gave it to him.
They turned at a chugging, rattling sound, just audible over the patter of rain on the umbrella. To Unwin the sound was unmistakable—it was the Rooks’ steam truck. The vehicle was not far off, and running hot, to judge from the high-pitched whine that accompanied the thunderous clamor of its engine. Jasper was coming for him.
“Charles,” the bellhop said. “Go!”
Unwin collapsed the umbrella and tucked it under his arm. He turned his bicycle onto the street, pedaling hard despite the stiffness in his legs. He rode north along the park, following as best he could the route Miss Greenwood and the other sleepwalkers had taken the night before. Cold water dripped off his hat brim and trickled past his collar, down his spine. His pants were flecked with grime from the street, and his socks squelched in his shoes.
No one drove on the avenue. Some cars and taxicabs were left in the middle of the road or driven up onto the curb and abandoned. In that strange quiet, the sounds of the steam truck grew steadily louder. The rumbling seemed to come from every direction at once, echoing off the facades of buildings and through the twilit park.
Unwin braked in front of the Municipal Museum. Edwin Moore was seated on the bottom step, shivering beneath the umbrella Unwin had given him. The old clerk saw Unwin’s reflection in the puddle he was staring at and looked up, squinting under his thick white eyebrows.
“Mr. Moore,” Unwin said. “What happened?”
“Do I know you?” Moore said. He studied Unwin’s face, shaking his head. “I can’t recall. I know that I knew, and yet . . . Mr. Unwin, that’s your name, isn’t it? Did we work together?”
“I’m Charles Unwin. We were in the rowboat together, and then the taxi—”
“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.