Miss Truesdale was still waiting for an answer.
“We’ll send someone,” he said.
She did not seem content with that, and her knuckles turned white as she squeezed her purse again. She was about to speak but was interrupted by a creaking sound that came out of the wall beside the bookshelf. She and Unwin both followed it with their eyes. He imagined a monstrous rat crawling up behind the wainscoting, led by its infallible nose toward the enormous cadaver that Unwin had hidden under the desk. The creaking sound rose nearly to the ceiling, then stopped, and a little bell on Lamech’s desk chimed twice.
“Aren’t you going to get that?” Miss Truesdale asked.
Unwin raised his shoulders as Mr. Duden often did in moments of displeasure. “I’m afraid I must ask you to leave now,” he said. “I have an appointment, one that was scheduled in the usual way.”
She nodded as though she had expected this all along. “The Gilbert, Room 202. You won’t forget, will you?”
He wrote that down at the top of the notepad, repeating aloud, “The Gilbert, Room 202. Now, you try to get some rest, Miss Truesdale.” He rose and showed her to the door. She went willingly, though she seemed to have more to say. He avoided her eyes and closed the door before she could speak again, then waited, listening. He heard her sigh, heard her irregular footsteps retreat down the hall, then the rush of air as the elevator door opened and closed.
The bell rang again.
He went to the wall and felt it with the palm of his hand. The surface was cool to the touch. He put an ear against it and held his breath. From the building’s unseen recesses came a low keening sound, as of wind trapped in a tunnel or air shaft. What could be hidden there? Unwin recalled something Sivart had written about the manor of Colonel Baker, in the case reports chronicling that wretched man’s three deaths: It’s more secret passageways than real passageways, and every looking glass is a two-way mirror. I had to shake the hand of a suit of armor, if you can believe it, to open the door to the library. The old guys are suckers for the classic stuff.
Could the same be said of Mr. Lamech? Unwin went to the bookshelf and began to search. The books were identified only by roman numerals and alphabetical ranges; reference works, perhaps, for some vast and intricate discipline. He did not need to comprehend the subject to find what he was looking for: one volume, the spine worn at the top from frequent handling. He pulled it forward, and immediately a panel in the wall flew open, revealing something like a miniature elevator car. Inside was an envelope of brown paper, about a foot square, with a note attached.
Taking it, Unwin felt he was crossing a boundary that had long separated him from the world that was the subject of his work. But here was a note, so brief that he read it in the instant he saw it.
Edward,
Here is your special order. I didn’t peek. But if you want my advice, you’ll let sleeping corpses lie.
Kisses
Miss P.
That the Agency should employ a dumbwaiter came as a surprise. It was his understanding that every communication, no matter how trivial, was to be conveyed by messenger. The operator of the switchboard could not even connect one employee to another—Agency bylaws dictated that the telephones were for external calls only. So what manner of special order could this be, to have arrived in the office of a dead man by such extraordinary means?
The envelope was heavy, unbending, and unsealed. Might Lamech have been planning to present this to him when they met? Unwin slid one finger under the flap of the envelope and tilted it open.
Inside was a phonograph record. Unlike those he had seen for sale in music shops, it was pale white, almost translucent, and at its center was the Agency’s open-eyed insignia, the spindle hole serving as pupil. Looking closer, he saw a series of letters and numbers imprinted between the groove of the lead-out. The three-letter prefix, TTS, was one he had seen on every report to cross his desk in twenty years, seven months, and some-odd days. It stood for Travis T. Sivart.
The bell rang again, and the dumbwaiter sank toward the place from which it had come. Unwin closed the panel. He felt he was a clerk again: composed, prepared to carry on, engrossed by the facts of the thing and not the thing itself. He returned to Lamech’s desk, tore off the page of notes from his meeting with Miss Truesdale, and put that in his pocket.
He glanced at the telephone. Why had the cord been left unplugged? Unwin reinserted it into the base of the phone, then switched off the green-shaded lamp.
The phonograph record, he knew, was evidence from the scene of a crime, and to take it would be to commit another. But a moment later Lamech’s door was closed, the elevator on its way back to the thirty-sixth floor, and the record inside Unwin’s briefcase, snug beside his copy of The Manual of Detection.
How to account for this splendid misconduct?
When it came to Sivart’s cases, it should not surprise us to learn that Unwin’s sense of stewardship might extend even to covetousness. If the chosen clerk of “the detective’s detective” is to come upon a file—however strange in form—that is by all rights his to review, register, and archive, is he to leave it and walk away, as though Sivart’s latest case never existed? Another file, perhaps, Unwin could have forsaken. But even that minor report would have come to haunt him, in those moments before dusk when the city is enveloped in shadow.
Unwin had known few such evenings; he hoped for no more. When the elevator arrived, he told the attendant to take him to the twenty-ninth floor. He wanted to inspect his new office.
ON THE TWENTY-NINTH FLOOR, another long hall, another lone window at its end. But in place of the carpeting of the thirty-sixth, here was a buffed surface of dark wood, so spotless and smooth it shone with liquid brilliance. The floor gave Unwin pause. It was his personal curse that his shoes squeaked on polished floors. The type of shoes he wore made no difference, nor did it matter whether the soles were wet or dry. If the shoes contained Unwin’s feet and were directed along well-polished routes, they would without fail sound their joyless noise for all to hear.
At home he went about in his socks. That way he could avoid disturbing the neighbors and also indulge in the occasional shoeless swoop across the room, as when one is preparing a breakfast of oatmeal and the oatmeal wants raisins and brown sugar, which are in the cupboard at the other end of the room. To glide with sock-swaddled feet over a world of glossy planes: that would be a wondrous thing! But Unwin’s apartment was smallish at best, and the world is unkind to the shoeless and frolicsome.
He could not remove his shoes with the elevator attendant looking on. Unwin’s two extra trips this morning were suspicious enough, though the little man gave no indication that he thought anything of it. So Unwin walked resolutely from the elevator and pretended not to hear the commotion for which he was responsible.
The doors here were more numerous and more narrow than on the thirty-sixth, and in the absence of plaques, names were painted in black over opaque glass windows. From within the offices came the steady patter of typewriters, while here and there voices muttered hushed inscrutables. Was it only Unwin’s imagination that the voices quieted at his advance?
Room 2919, halfway down the hall, was not unoccupied—the window glowed with amber light. Unwin touched the glass. The name inscribed there had been scraped away, and only recently: black flecks of paint still clung to the frame.
He became suddenly aware of a spatial concurrence. His new office, at the middle of the east side of the twenty-ninth floor, was situated directly above his old desk on the fourteenth and directly below Lamech’s office on the thirty-sixth. If a hole were drilled vertically down the building, a penny pushed off Lamech’s desk would, on its descent toward Unwin’s desk twenty-two floors below, fall straight through Room 2919.
He was still standing there when the door behind him opened and the detective with the thin mustache and navy blue suit stepped into the hall. He was about to light a cigarette, but when he saw Unwin, his pale lips went taut with
a smirk. “I told you they wouldn’t go for that hat on the thirty-sixth floor,” he said. “Actually, it isn’t well regarded here either.”
“I’m sorry,” was all Unwin could think to say.
“Okay, you’re sorry. But who are you?”
Unwin’s identification was in his coat pocket, but it was the identification of a clerk who did not belong on this floor. So along with the badge, he presented the memo from Lamech. The detective snatched them both, glanced at the badge, jabbed that back at Unwin, then read the memo slowly. “This isn’t addressed to you,” he said, and stuffed it into his own pocket. “I better confirm it with Lamech.”
“I believe that Mr. Lamech doesn’t wish to be disturbed.”
“Not by some kidney-foot clerk, maybe.” The detective snickered. “And this is the guy they got to replace Travis.”
Unwin opened his mouth to protest but closed it once he understood what the detective had said. He, Unwin, was replacing Detective Sivart? He had neither the training nor the disposition required for the job. He was a clerk—a fine one, to be sure, and respected among his peers for his shrewd demeanor, his discerning eye, his encyclopedic knowledge of the elements of a case. He was tenacious in his way, insightful when he needed to be—but only into things already written down. He was no Sivart. And what had happened to Sivart, that he could need replacing?
The detective pointed at him with his unlit cigarette. “I’ll be watching you, neighbor,” he said. He removed the handkerchief from his jacket pocket and used it to polish the outer knob of his office door, then the inner knob, too. When he realized that Unwin was watching him, he snapped, “I am an enemy to messiness in all its forms,” then stuffed the handkerchief back into his pocket. He threw the door closed behind him. The name on the glass was Benjamin Screed.
Unwin tucked his umbrella under his arm and turned back to 2919. So this had been Sivart’s office, and now he was meant to occupy it. Meanwhile, the woman in the plaid coat had taken his place on the fourteenth floor. Did that make her his clerk? How would she busy herself until he filed his first report? At this rate she could be waiting for a very long time.
FOUR
On Clues
Most everything can be divided into two categories:
details and clues. Knowing one from the other is more
important than knowing your left shoe from your right.
Room 2919 was small and windowless. At the center of the office was a desk, its surface covered with balled-up sheets of typing paper. The lamp was on. Seated with her head slumped over the back of the chair was a round-faced young woman, thick red hair bound up with a pin at the top of her head. Crooked small teeth were just visible between her parted lips. Her plump, short-fingered hands were limp across the keyboard of the typewriter.
Was it Unwin’s fate to go from one office to another discovering a fresh corpse in each of them? No—this woman was not dead. He saw now the soft rise and fall of her shoulders, heard the sound of her snoring. Unwin cleared his throat, but the woman did not stir. He drew closer, peering over the desk to see what she had been typing.
Don’t fall asleep. Don’t fall asleep. Don’t fall asleep. Don’t fall asleep. Don’t fall asleep. Don’t fall asleep.
The phrase was repeated over half the page, but at last she had written:
Don’t fall asleep. Don’t fall asleep. Don’t fall
Unwin removed his hat and cleared his throat again.
The woman twisted in her chair and shifted her head from her left shoulder to her right. Her hair tumbled free of the pin that held it in place, and a few strands stuck to her lipstick. The light from the desk lamp flashed in her eyeglasses but did not wake her. She began to snore more loudly.
Unwin reached over and pressed the typewriter’s carriage release. The platen flew to the end of the line with a clatter, and the bell sounded high and clear. The woman woke and sat straight in her chair. “I don’t know any songs for this,” she said.
“Songs for what?”
She blinked behind her glasses, which were too big for her girlish face. She could not have been much older than Unwin was on his first day at the Agency. “Are you Detective Unwin?” she asked.
“Yes, I’m Unwin.”
She rose and swept her hair back up on her head, fixing it in place—not with a pin, Unwin now saw, but with a sharpened pencil. She said, “I’m your assistant, Emily Doppel.”
She straightened her blue woolen dress, then began clearing the crumpled pages off her desk and into a wastepaper basket. Her hands were shaking a little, and Unwin thought he should leave the room and give her the chance to recover, but she spoke quickly and without pause as she worked, so he was unable to excuse himself. “I’m an excellent typist, and I practice as much as I’m able,” she said. “I’ve studied the Agency’s most important cases, and I’m not averse to working extra hours. My greatest fault is my susceptibility to unpredictable bouts of deep sleep. The irony of my condition, in light of the Agency’s foremost motto, is not lost on me. But the work I’ve done to make up for my weakness has strengthened my resolve beyond normal expectations. I apologize in advance for the snoring.”
All that remained on her desk—aside from the typewriter, telephone, and lamp—was a shiny black lunch box.
Emily came around the desk and reached to take Unwin’s hat, but he held tightly to the brim. She clutched it and tugged until he relented, then she brushed off the trilby and hung it on the coatrack.
She stood very close, and the room felt suddenly small for them both. He could smell her perfume in the air: lavender. She reached for his briefcase, and he drew it against his chest, shielding it with both arms.
“It’s okay,” she said, her smile revealing her crooked teeth. “That’s what I’m here for.”
So his assistant knew what she was here for, even if Unwin did not. But what to do with her? Were he at his desk on the fourteenth floor, he might have been able to think of something. There were always labels to be typed, folders to be sorted: alphabetically, in chronological or reverse-chronological order. But Unwin took pleasure even in those minor tasks and would not soon have parted with them.
He freed one arm from his coat and transferred his briefcase to the other hand while Emily slipped the coat off and away and hung it below the hat. She had also taken possession of his umbrella without his seeing how it was done.
“I have a lot of work to do,” he said.
She folded her hands in front of her. “I’m prepared, of course, to hear all about our case, assuming you’ve already been contacted by your watcher.”
“I have . . . conferred with the gentleman,” Unwin said.
There was a knock at the door, and Emily opened it before Unwin could stop her. In the hall stood a man in a crisp white shirt and yellow suspenders. His age was unapparent: the unkempt blond hair belonged on the head of a boy of thirteen, but he entered the room with the unhesitant calm of someone much older. He was holding a shoe-box-size package wrapped in brown paper.
“Messenger for you, sir,” Emily announced, as though Unwin were not in the room with her.
Unwin accepted the package and unwrapped it while the two watched. Inside was an Agency identification badge for Charles Unwin, Detective. Beside it was a pistol. Unwin snapped the box shut. “Who sent this?”
“That information is not within the bounds of my message,” said the messenger, running his thumbs along the undersides of his suspender straps.
Unwin had parlayed with messengers before. He found them, on the whole, a rascally lot, prone to twist the rules governing their profession to their own advantage. This one was clearly no exception.
“Can you tell me when it was sent?” Unwin tried.
The messenger only looked at the ceiling, as though to acknowledge the question would shame them both.
“Are you free to take a message, then?”
With that, Unwin knew he had snared the man. Messengers were obliged to deliver only what they
were given, whether packages or words, but they had to take a message whenever asked. This one let go of his suspenders and sighed. “Spoken or typed?” he asked.
“Typed,” said Unwin. “Emily, you told me you are an excellent typist.”
“Yes, sir.” She returned to her typewriter and loaded a fresh sheet of paper bearing the Agency seal. She held her hands suspended over the keys and tilted her head a little to the left. Her eyes went unfocused, as though she were gazing into some distant, tranquil place.
Unwin began, “To colon Lamech comma Watcher comma floor thirty-six return from colon Charles Unwin comma capital C capital L capital E capital R capital K comma floor fourteen comma temporarily floor twenty-nine return.
“Now for the body of the text. Sir comma with all due respect comma I must request your immediate attention to the matter of my recent promotion comma which I believe has been given in error point.”
Emily’s typing was confident and somewhat brash—she threw the carrier to each new line with a flourish, as one might turn a page of exquisite piano music, and her fingers danced high off the keys at the end of each sentence. Her style lent Unwin even greater resolve.
“As you may know comma I am solely responsible for the case files of Detective Travis Tee point Sivart point. Naturally comma I hope to return to that work as soon as possible point. If you are unable to reply to this message comma I will assume that the matter has been settled comma as I would not wish to trouble you any further than is necessary point. I will of course make sure that you receive a copy of my report point.”
Emily plucked the page from her typewriter, folded it into thirds, and slipped it into an envelope. The messenger put it in his satchel and left.