The Manual of Detection

  “You could have told me right from the start.”

  “Nah, you would have screwed it up if I’d done that. Like today, except our friend out there would’ve been awake, and he would’ve remembered to bring his gun.”

  Outside, Emily and Miss Greenwood had arrived at the tire swing. They were still speaking, and they seemed to have come to an agreement of some kind. Miss Greenwood was nodding, her arms crossed over her belly, while Emily stood with one foot up on the tire.

  “That Emily’s a firecracker,” Sivart said as he ate. “Reminds me a little of Cleo’s girl. Now, Penny, she was an odd kid. Barely ever talked, listened to everything like she was taking notes. I used to see her down there on the swing. It never seemed like she was playing, really. More like she was just—I don’t know—waiting.”

  Unwin spread butter over his pancakes. “Hoffmann looked almost afraid of her when I saw them together in Lamech’s dream.”

  Sivart grinned and stabbed another piece of bacon. “He should’ve been. I wish you’d seen him when he realized what she was doing with his sleepwalkers. I thought his skull would break open and we’d both fall out.

  “You know, Penny caught me at Central Terminal the day I was headed out here. We talked it all through in advance, about you being our agent in the field. We needed radio silence through the whole thing after that. Between Arthur and Enoch, there were no safe channels.”

  “That’s why she’s at Central Terminal every morning,” Unwin said. “She’s waiting for you to come back and let her know it’s over.”

  Sivart chewed thoughtfully, washed it down with coffee. “I’m not going back, Charlie,” he said.

  The two women came inside, and Miss Greenwood went straight for the coffee. Emily stood in the doorway until Sivart gestured at her and said, “Sit. Eat.” Then she reluctantly found a chair and put her lunch box on the table.

  Sivart looked at it and said, “Do you have one of an old detective, ready to retire, a respectable gut under his coat?”

  “No,” Emily said. “They’re all active-duty.”

  “Well, those days are over for me,” he agreed. Then he turned to Miss Greenwood. “How about you, honey?”

  “I’m going to get some sleep,” she said.

  “Here? Or in the slammer?”

  “Here,” Emily said. “But that depends on Detective Unwin, really. He’ll be the one writing the report.”

  Miss Greenwood looked at Unwin over the rim of her cup.

  “I’ll have to include everything I know,” he said. “But I’m a clerk again, so it’s my job to determine what’s relevant and what isn’t.”

  Sivart shook his head and snickered. “Spoken like a true-blue spook,” he said.

  For a while the only sounds were the clatter of forks on plates and spoons in coffee cups and the ticking of a clock in another room. Sivart, sated, leaned back in his chair and raised his arms over his head. “Still,” he said, “I wish we all could have sat down and talked about it. The three of you, me, Hoffmann. Even Arthur down there.”

  Miss Greenwood had begun to doze in her chair, but now she was listening again. Her voice was cold when she spoke. “It would have been helpful for your memoirs,” she said.

  Sivart shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Unwin knew they were all thinking the same thing—that those memoirs, if Sivart ever wrote them, would have to tell the story as it was in the files, not as they knew it now. The detective was looking to Unwin for help, but it was Emily who spoke first.

  “Maybe we can open the archive to you,” she said. “For your research.”

  Sivart took the napkin out of his collar and said, “Fine. That would be fine.” He got up and started gathering the dirty dishes.

  Later Sivart and Miss Greenwood walked Unwin back to the station while Emily returned to the clearing. (“Someone has to start cleaning up,” she said.) A cool breeze was blowing off the river, and Unwin noticed details he had failed to include in his dream of the place: the second church steeple at the south end of town, bits of trash floating along the shore, some old railroad ties in the weeds beside the tracks. If Arthur had not been asleep for so long, he might have sensed that something was wrong when he followed Unwin here. But waking and dreaming must have been a blur to him by the end.

  One part of Unwin’s dream had carried over to the real world somehow. The rain was gone, and the sun was rising into a clear sky. It was as though no one trusted it yet—all the people climbing into the train still wore raincoats and carried umbrellas.

  The conductor called for them to board. Sivart, suddenly sheepish, rubbed the bristles on his chin and said, “I think I promised you a drink once, Charlie.”

  “Another time,” Unwin said. “Maybe next month, for your birthday.”

  “What, you figured it out?”

  What Unwin had figured out was that Sivart did not have a hunch on the morning of November twelfth, as he wrote in his report. It was just that Arthur and Hoffmann chose the one day of the year that the detective would notice had gone missing.

  Sivart handed Unwin the typewriter that had been at his bedside, closed up in its case now. “It’s just my old portable,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll need it anymore. And there’s no telling how the chips are going to fall, back at the home office. Might be good to keep a little nimble, you know?”

  Unwin hefted the case to test its weight. It was lighter than he expected, but he noticed a keyhole by the latch. Sivart saw what he was looking at.

  “Let’s see,” the detective said. Then, with a swift, graceful movement, he reached behind Unwin’s ear. The key was in his hand when he brought it back.

  Sivart’s grin fell away, and his face went pale. “I didn’t even mean to do that,” he said. “A week ago I didn’t know how. More Hoffmann’s style, really. You don’t think there are side effects, from all that time we spent cooped up together? Like maybe there’s a bit of old twiddle-fingers still left in here?”

  Unwin recalled what young Penny Greenwood, all those years ago, had said to Sivart when she read his palm. That he would live a long life but part of it would not be his own. Unwin took the key. “Thank you,” he said. “The typewriter is perfect.”

  The detective, something like fear on his face, stared at his own shaking hand. Miss Greenwood took it in her own and held it. “Don’t worry,” she said to Unwin. “I’ll take care of him.”

  Unwin boarded and chose a seat on the side facing the shore. As the train pulled away, he glimpsed Sivart trudging back up the road, toward the cottage. He and Miss Greenwood were walking arm in arm.

  Unwin opened the typewriter on his lap. One of the oak leaves was stuck between the type bars. He put that in his pocket, loaded a fresh sheet of paper, and began to work on his report. “I,” he decided, would have to be part of it after all.

  Lest details be mistaken for clues, note that I ride my bicycle to work every day, even when it is raining. That’s how I came to be at Central Terminal last Wednesday morning with my hands full and my umbrella under my arm. So encumbered, I found it impossible to recover the umbrella dropped to the floor by a certain party, whose role in all this I will, over the course of this report, attempt to explain. She was, as they say, “in on it” from the beginning, whereas I was merely “it,” and I use the word as children do when playing games that involve running and hiding, and seeking those who are hidden.

  We have been playing a game like that, a great many of us for a great many years. Some of us did not know we were playing, and some of us were not told all the rules.

  Now that I have the opportunity to begin this report, I do not know how best to categorize it. I am both clerk and detective, but due to the circumstances of the case at hand I am also neither of those things. A train will bring you back to the place you came from, but it will not return you home.

  Dozens more black raincoats boarded the train at each stop on its descent through the valley. The clattering of the wheels kept time with the rhythm of Unw
in’s typing, and newspapers rustled all around. He caught sight of one of the headlines: RETURN OF THE CARNIVAL THAT NEVER LEFT.

  He wrote, At least I know who I am writing this report for. Miss Greenwood’s daughter is my clerk, after all, and she will want every detail, every clue, from top to bottom.

  The seven twenty-seven train arrived at Central Terminal one minute late as usual. Unwin put the typewriter away and slipped the pages of his first report into an empty folder from his briefcase. He waited for the last of the black raincoats to pour out the doors, then followed them through Gate Fourteen. The woman in the plaid coat stood on her toes. She stopped searching when she saw him, and he went to her. She had been waiting a long time.

  HE did NOT see Emily again for several days. When he did, it was on the Agency elevator. She was wearing the same blue woolen dress she had worn the day they started working together. At first it seemed as though she were going to ignore him. “I’m sorry,” she finally said. “It’s just that it’s against policy for us to speak.”

  “You’ve been promoted.”

  “Yes.”

  “High up in the ranks, I hope.”

  “Very,” she said, and touched the pencil in her hair. “Some of the watchers, I guess, have had their eyes on me. And then, you know, there was a vacancy.”

  Unwin recalled Miss Palsgrave’s words about the changing of the guard and knew that it was not Edward Lamech’s place Emily had taken. She had been the overseer’s only assistant—no one knew the job better than she did. He wondered whether she kept those figurines on her desk while she worked: totems of the agents whose efforts she now directed. Better that, he supposed, than those blank-eyed pigeons.

  “There must be a lot of changes under way,” Unwin said.

  Her gaze grew suddenly hard. “Well, change takes time. And there are only a few people who know as much about this place as you do, Mr. Unwin, so I’m trusting you to keep it that way. Do you follow me?”

  “I’m not sure that I do.”

  “Please try, Mr. Unwin. You’re very valuable to us.” Her voice softened. “To me, I mean. It would be terrible, you know, if you put me in a difficult position.”

  “A difficult position,” Unwin said.

  She took his hand and pressed something into it. He recognized its shape against his palm: it was the figurine from her collection that he thought looked like him. The one with his hands on his knees and a look of astonishment on his face. She kept her hand in his until they reached the twenty-ninth floor. Then Unwin pocketed the figurine and stepped off the elevator, turning to say good-bye. Emily’s smile was sad, and Unwin thought for a moment that the sight of her crooked teeth would break his heart—and then it did, a little. He could not even tell her why, not now, though she might understand once she received his report.

  Emily looked away as the attendant closed the door.

  He packed his things quickly: silver letter opener, magnifying glass, spare spools of typewriter ribbon. He took some typing paper, too. It could be a long time before he had fresh supplies at hand again.

  He closed the office door behind him and found Screed waiting in the hall.

  “I need your help getting this thing lit,” Screed said. His right arm was in a cast, and he was fumbling with the lighter in his left hand. Unwin took it from him, struck the flint, and raised the flame to the cigarette dangling from the detective’s lips. It was the first time Unwin had actually seen him smoking.

  “Everything was just as you said it was,” Screed said. “The Cat & Tonic was empty, and there was Hoffmann, asleep in his chair. Wasn’t he surprised to see me, after your alarm went off! I had him, Unwin.”

  “You had him,” Unwin repeated.

  “I wanted to take my time, you know. Get in touch with the right people at the newspaper. I figured that everyone should know about the historic occasion. I left him locked in my closet while I made the arrangements.”

  “But you forgot about his voice,” Unwin said.

  Screed looked at the floor and coughed smoke through his nose. “I was only gone a minute. When I got back to my office, Peake and Crabtree were waiting in the dark. They jumped me. Hoffmann had called them over using my voice and convinced them that Hoffmann had stuck me in the closet and was coming back to kill me. By the time we’d figured out what happened, he was gone.”

  Screed would not look Unwin in the eyes. They both knew that Hoffmann might never be caught again, that he could already be anywhere, anyone. But if Sivart really did have a bit of Hoffmann still in his brain, might the opposite also be true? It pleased Unwin to imagine a fragment of the detective in the magician’s mind, shadowing his every move.

  After a while Unwin said, “At least you got the Oldest Murdered Man.”

  Screed sighed. “There’s one old museum attendant down there who was pretty pleased about it. Not sure anyone else cared. I think they’re even going to keep the plaque with Sivart’s name on it.”

  Screed was still smoking when Unwin left, flinching each time he had to move his arm.

  The fourteenth floor was Unwin’s next stop. The clerks pretended not to see him, which made the walk to his old desk a little easier. Even now the sounds of the place tugged at him. He would have liked to sit for a while with his eyes closed, just listening to those typewriters and file drawers.

  Penelope Greenwood had packed her things into a cardboard box. When she saw Unwin, she tucked it under her arm and put on her gray cap. Mr. Duden was watching as they returned to the elevator together. Unwin glanced behind him and caught the overclerk wringing his hands.

  Out on the sidewalk, Unwin stood with Penny in the sunlight and waited. After the third time he checked his watch, she took his wrist gently and said, “Charles, this isn’t the kind of thing it’s possible to be late for.”

  She had returned to the city to revenge the murder of Caligari—but revenge, Unwin had come to understand, was not her only motive. She felt it was her duty to reclaim the thing that was lost when the carnival passed to her father. “The unknown will always be boundless,” Caligari had said, and Unwin believed that Penelope Greenwood meant to keep it that way.

  Some at the Agency, he thought, would be pleased to hear that the organization had a proper adversary again.

  Caligari’s Carnival rounded the corner. It was restored in full and traveling again, the mud of the old fairgrounds washed away, its every part repainted red or green or yellow, flinging streamers and music in all directions. The remnants had taken to their trucks; they waved and honked horns at the children who shouted from the sidewalks. The parade heaved itself in starts and stutters up the avenue, and at the front were the elephants, walking trunk to tail. Penelope had cleaned and fed them and scrubbed them behind their ears. Even the oldest of the three looked lively again.

  As the parade drew close, a series of deep thudding sounds shook the sidewalk. Unwin and Penny held each other’s arms as cracks appeared in the cement at their feet and a gust of hot, acrid air erupted from the Agency lobby. They turned to see black smoke streaming out the door, and with it a crowd of bewildered, red-faced men clutching bowler hats to their heads. Whistling sounds and the cracks of explosives followed.

  Unwin and Penny drew closer as the underclerks tumbled past them, shouting and coughing, some still pulling jackets over their pajamas. The crowd merged with the parade in the street, bringing the procession to a halt. Clowns and underclerks toppled over one another as drivers shouted from their seats and hats, pillows, and balloons flew into the air. Up and down the avenue, people huddled at open windows to watch the spectacle. The youngest elephant, out of delight or indignation, reared on its hind legs and trumpeted.

  The tremors ceased as Hildegard Palsgrave ducked out through the lobby door, her arms and face covered in soot. She dragged her enormous pink chair behind her, and on it was her phonograph. “My first fireworks display in years,” she said.

  Penelope shook soot from the dress of the giantess. “You haven’t l
ost your touch,” she said.

  Unwin gazed up the facade of the Agency office building and saw windows opening on every floor. Clerks looked down from the nearest rows, taking turns at the view. Detectives watched from their higher floors, shaking their heads at the scene. Farther up, so far that Unwin could not make out the expressions on their faces, the watchers observed everything from the comfort of their private offices, and above them, fewer in number, were operatives whose titles and functions he did not know.

  Emily’s first week on the job, and changes were under way more quickly than she had anticipated. The watchers would be asking their new overseer what to do, now that the chief clerk of the third archive had destroyed what she helped to create.

  Edgar Zlatari was driving the Rooks’ truck. He navigated slowly through the crowd and drew up to the curb with the steam engine sputtering. Theodore Brock, the knife thrower, was in the cab beside him, and Jasper was still in the back, still sleeping. Miss Palsgrave set her chair beside Jasper and climbed in.

  “What about the Forty Winks?” Unwin asked Zlatari. “What about your work?”

  “Show me a place where nobody’s drinking and nobody’s dying, and I’ll show you a man ready to stay put,” he said. “Besides, there’s an old crook in need of burying. Seems his funeral’s been long delayed.”

  Unwin looked at Penelope, and she smiled. They must have smuggled Caligari’s remains out of the museum somehow, after the real mummy was returned.

  Miss Palsgrave smacked the roof of the cab to signal that she was ready. She had a traveling bag with her, and inside were more recordings of Miss Greenwood’s songs, to make sure Jasper Rook stayed sleeping.

  Unwin was tired, too. He had worn himself down—to nothing, nearly—with his cuts and corrections, his erasures and emendations. He was awake now, but was there still time for him? His mind had wearied of its appointed rounds, of the stream of typescript and transcript, and now he wondered what might have been different, what might still be different, if only the day would hold and not abandon him to sleep.