The Manual of Detection

  A thing like that tends to stick out, so it wasn’t too hard to track it down. Caligari’s Travels-No-More Carnival was closed up for the night: nothing on the midway but the smell of stale popcorn. I found the truck parked beside a pavilion near the boardwalk and pressed my thumb to the smokestack over the engine. Still warm.

  I thought I’d have a peek inside, but somebody was coming from the docks, and I had to scram. The tent flap was hanging open by the entrance, so I wrapped myself in that and hoped nobody would spot my hat. In the end, though, I couldn’t help but risk a look.

  What I saw was a tall fellow with one very odd mug. It looked like it was made out of clay, all pocked and pale, but his eyes were bright green. He peered into the cab, his breath fogging up the glass. Then he sighed and walked on.

  I came out in a hurry, meaning to get out of there, and nearly walked straight into a second man. The weird thing, clerk? It was the same guy I’d just seen go in the opposite direction. Turns out this model of goon comes in sets of two.

  He called to his brother, and they got hold of me quick, then gave me a very professional roughing over. Our walk down to the pier was less than romantic. A rusting smuggler’s ship, The Wonderly, was docked down there. The whole thing reeked, like maybe they’d just raised it off the filthy bottom of the harbor.

  The man in charge was a squat little fellow in a rumpled gray suit. The Man of a Thousand and One Voices is more impressive in the carnival posters, with his face lit green by hocus-pocus. In the flesh he looks more like an accountant who’s had a bad day and stumbled into the wrong part of town. He was shaking his head, looking sad about the whole thing. I was sad about it, too, and I let him know, in so many words.

  We talked for a while. His real voice (if that’s what it was) sounded soft and high-pitched, like a kid’s. He explained how the Oldest Murdered Man had been the carnival’s main attraction for years, that they had been searching for the mummy for a long time. “I’m only bringing him back home,” he said.

  “Why the boat, then?” I asked.

  Enoch Hoffmann grinned. “The boat is for you,” he said, and that’s when his two buddies threw me into the cargo hold.

  The story of the detective’s escape—how he found the corpse on board, commandeered a lifeboat, and rowed it ashore through the night—was in the newspapers the next morning. Agency representatives returned the Oldest Murdered Man to the museum that day, amid shouted questions and the popping of flashbulbs.

  But if the mummy was not in the museum now, where was he? And whose corpse was here in his place?

  WITH HELP FROM SOME of the schoolchildren, Unwin carried Moore into a back room. The place served as a holding area for pieces of exhibits on their way into or out of the museum. Objects that might have seemed momentous in the galleries languished here like junk-sale leftovers. Paintings leaned in piles against the walls, sarcophagi gathered dust in the corners, marble statues lay half buried in packing material. The children put Edwin Moore on a worn blue chaise longue, and he lay with his arms over his face, shivering and mumbling.

  “Is he a knight?” one of the children asked.

  “He’s an artist,” another one said.

  “He’s a mummy,” insisted a third.

  Unwin corralled them back into the museum and set them in line behind their chaperone, who had failed to notice them leave. The children waved good-bye, and Unwin waved back. When they were gone, he walked partway down the hall and peered around the corner. He did not see the man with the blond beard.

  From his sickbed Moore called out for water. Unwin searched though the crates and found a bowl, dark clay with a black crisscross pattern around the exterior. It was, he supposed, ancient, priceless, and difficult to drink from, but it would have to do. He filled it from the drinking fountain in the hall and carried it to the chaise longue with both hands.

  Moore sipped the water, spilling some onto his jacket. Then he lay down and sighed, but immediately began to shiver again. “There is no keeping it back,” he said. “I had bound it so tightly, it came undone all at once.”

  “You did meet with Sivart,” Unwin said.

  “Yes, oh, yes.” He took his arms from his face; it was as white as his hair. “But I never should have spoken to him. He left here in a passion. I thought he would chew his cigar in two. And you! Who are you?”

  Unwin considered showing the man his badge, then thought better of it. “I’m Charles Unwin, Agency clerk. My detective’s gone missing, and I’m trying to find him. Mr. Moore, you have to tell me where he went.”

  “Do I? I have already remembered too much, and they are sure to come for me now.” He gestured for the bowl of water, and Unwin raised it to his lips. He drank, coughed some, and said, “Not even the Agency wants every mystery solved, Mr. Unwin.”

  Unwin set the bowl aside. “I’m not trying to solve anything,” he said.

  Moore’s gaze appeared focused now, and the color was returning to his face. He looked at Unwin as though seeing him for the first time. “If you are Sivart’s clerk, then you ought to know where he went. The sight of the gold tooth left him baffled. He needed information, the most reliable he could find.” He added quietly, “Whatever the price.”

  Some of the places mentioned in Sivart’s reports were as foreign lands to Unwin—he came upon their names often enough to be convinced of their existence, but it was preposterous to think he could reach them by bicycle. For him there were two cities. One consisted of the seven blocks between his apartment and the Agency office building. The other was larger, vaguer, and more dangerous, and it intruded upon his imagination only by way of case reports and the occasional uneasy dream. In a shadowy corner of that other city was a certain taproom, an unofficial gathering place frequented by the enterprising, the scheming, and the desperate. Sivart went there only when every supposition had proved false, when every lead had dead-ended. And because the place rarely had any direct bearing on a case, Unwin usually excised its name from the files.

  “The Forty Winks,” he said.

  Moore nodded. “If you insist on tracking him down, Mr. Unwin, then I suggest you work quickly. I fear I’ve started the timer on an explosive, but I do not know when it will go off.” He rose suddenly from the chaise longue. He was light on his feet and seemed a little giddy.

  “What about the woman you mentioned?” Unwin asked. “The one you said showed you the tooth?”

  Moore grimaced and said, “I took you at your word when you said you aren’t trying to solve anything.”

  Unwin clenched his jaw. Without thinking, he had started asking questions he did not want to ask. After this, he thought, he would have to put down The Manual of Detection for good.

  “This way, then,” Moore said. “There is a back door—that will be the safest route.”

  The exit was no taller than Unwin’s waist. It was blocked by empty crates, so they worked together to move them aside. The door opened onto the park. Here the trees grew thickly about the back of the museum, and the path was matted with oak leaves, orange and red. Unwin crouched to go through and opened his umbrella on the other side.

  Moore bent down to look at him.

  “Tell me one thing,” Unwin said. “Is it true, what you said? That you wrote The Manual of Detection?”

  “Yes,” said Moore. “So take it from me—it is a bunch of rubbish. They should have asked a detective to write it. Instead they asked me, and what did I know?”

  “You weren’t a detective?”

  “I was a clerk,” Moore said, and he closed the door before Unwin could ask him anything else.

  HE RODE SOUTH THROUGH the city, his umbrella open in front of him. He ignored the blare of horns and the shouts of drivers as he wove through the midday traffic, keeping his head tucked low.

  He passed the narrow green door of his own apartment building, then the grime-blackened exterior of Central Terminal. There he caught sight of Neville, the boy from the breakfast cart, standing just out of the rain, smok
ing a cigarette.

  At the next block, Unwin veered east to avoid the Agency offices. He did not want to risk seeing Detective Screed again, or even his own assistant, not yet. The noise of the traffic receded as the cast-iron facades of warehouses and mill buildings rose up around him, rain pouring in torrents from their corniced rooftops. Unwin’s arms and legs were shaking now, but not from the exertion or from the cold. It was that dead face he had seen behind the glass in the museum. He felt as though it were still mocking him with its awful gold-toothed grin. The thread, the one that connected mystery to solution, that shone like silver in the dark—Sivart had picked the wrong one, and Unwin had strung it up as truth. What did the false thread connect?

  In the old port town, Unwin slowed to navigate the winding, crowded streets. Business carried on in spite of the rain, with deals being made under awnings and through the windows of food stalls. He felt he was being watched, not by one but by many. Was there something that marked him as an employee of the Agency? An invisible sign that the people here could read?

  He pedaled on, easing his grip on his umbrella. The rain fell softly now. In the maze of old streets that predated the gridding of the city, he passed timbered warehouses and old market squares cluttered with the refuse of industry. Machines—the purpose of which he could not guess—rusted in red streaks over the cobblestone.

  The crowds thinned. From chimneys, crooked fingers of smoke pointed at the clouds. Barren clotheslines sagged dripping over the street, and a few windows glowed yellow against the day’s persistent gloom. Unwin quickened his pace, his memory of Sivart’s descriptions serving as map, and came at last to the cemetery of Saints’ Hill, a six-acre tangle of weeds, dubious pathways, vine-grappled ridges, and tumble-down mausoleums.

  The Forty Winks was beneath the mortuary, a low-slung building of crumbling gray stone at the southeast corner of the block. He had half hoped that the place did not really exist, but the chipped steps leading from the sidewalk down to the basement level were real enough. He chained his bicycle to the cemetery fence, under the eaves of the building.

  From the top of the stairs, he could hear the smacking of pool balls, the clinking of glasses. He could still go home, if he wanted. Sleep off the day and wait for the next one, hope that everything would right itself somehow. But a window level with the sidewalk creaked open, and someone looked up at him, wrinkling his nose as though trying to catch Unwin’s scent. A pair of wide, reddish brown eyes blinked behind the glass.

  “In or out?” the man called from below.

  It was too late to go back. Unwin descended the stairwell, collapsing his umbrella just enough to make it fit. At the bottom of the steps was a slow drain, cigarette butts floating in the puddle that had formed. Unwin pushed the door open with the tip of his umbrella, then stepped over the water and into the Forty Winks.

  The tables were lit only by candles, while the bar, on the cemetery side, had the benefit of several windows near the ceiling, through which a greenish light dribbled over bottles of liquor. Most of the bottles were arranged on shelves in a tall, oblong cabinet, its door gaping.

  Not a cabinet, Unwin realized. A coffin.

  Near the entrance, two men sat with their hats in front of them, speaking close over a guttering candle. At the back of the room, an electric bulb with a green glass shade hung low over the pool table. Two other men, very tall and dressed in identical black suits, were in the midst of a game. They played slowly, taking a great deal of care with each shot.

  Sivart was nowhere to be seen. Unwin took a seat at the bar and set his briefcase in front of him. The man who had spoken through the window cranked it shut, made a show of dusting off his hands, and hopped down from the barrel he had climbed to reach. He ran a hand along the bar as he approached, sweeping up a folded newspaper. “Newsman says there’s foul play at the Agency,” he said. “An internal affair, they say. The eyes up top suspect one of their own.”

  A single black curl made an upside-down question mark in the middle of the man’s forehead. This was Edgar Zlatari, the caretaker of the cemetery and its only gravedigger. So long as no one was in need of burying, he served drinks to the living. He was someone who knew things, a collector of useful information.

  “New faces bring new woes, that’s what they say,” Zlatari went on. “What about you? You call your troubles by name? Or maybe they call you by yours?”

  Unwin did not know how to reply.

  “Leave your tongue on your pillow this morning? What’s your line, friend?” Zlatari cast a suspicious look at the briefcase, and Unwin slipped it onto his lap.

  “Okay, tight-lips. What’ll it be, then?”

  “Me?” Unwin said.

  The bartender looked around, rolling his eyes. He smelled of whiskey and damp earth. “ ‘Me?’ he says. That’s a laugh.”

  The two at the table snickered, but the men at the pool table were unamused. At the sight of this, Zlatari’s grin vanished. “Come on, pal,” he said to Unwin. “A drink. What do you want to drink?”

  There were too many bottles stacked in that coffin, too many choices. What would Sivart have ordered? A hundred times the detective must have named his drinks of choice. But Unwin had stricken them from the reports, and now he found he could not remember even one. Instead the response to Emily’s secret phrase came uselessly to mind: And doubly in the bubbly.

  “Root beer,” he said at last.

  Zlatari blinked several times, as though maybe he had never heard of the stuff. Then he shrugged and moved away down the bar. On the wall beyond the register was a tattered velvet curtain. In the moment Zlatari drew it aside, Unwin glimpsed a tiny kitchen. A radio was playing back there, and he thought he recognized the song—a slow melody carried by horns, a woman singing just above them, voice rising with the swell of strings. He was sure he had heard the tune somewhere before and had almost placed it when Zlatari pulled the curtain closed behind him.

  Unwin shifted on his stool. In the mirror he could see the men at the booth behind him. One tapped his hat excitedly as he said, “Have I got a story!” and the other man leaned forward to listen, though the man with the story told it loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear.

  “I saw Bones Kiley the other night,” he said, “and we were just talking business, you know? Then suddenly, out of nowhere, he started talking business. So I said to him, ‘Wait, wait, do you want to talk about business? Because if it’s business you want to talk about, then we shouldn’t be talking about business, because there’s business and there’s business.’ ”

  “Ha,” said the other man.

  “So then I asked him, ‘Just what sort of business are you in, Bones, that you want to talk about business?’ ”

  “Ha ha,” said the other.

  “And Bones gets serious-looking, kind of screws up his eyebrows like this . . .”

  “Ha.”

  “. . . and he looks at me with his eyes squinty, and he says in this really deep voice, ‘I’m in the business of blood.’ ”

  The other man said nothing.

  “So I said to him,” and the man with the story raised his voice even higher as he finished his story, “ ‘The business of blood? The business of blood? Bones, there is no business but the business of blood!’ ”

  Both men laughed and tapped their hats in unison, and the candle flickered and flared, making their shadows twitch on the uneven stone wall.

  While the man with the story was telling it, the two at the pool table had set down their cue sticks. Identical faces, lips pale gray, eyes bright green: Unwin wondered if these could be the Rook brothers, Jasper and Josiah, the twin thugs who had aided Enoch Hoffmann in the theft of the Oldest Murdered Man, and in countless other misdeeds during the years of his criminal reign. The worst thing that can happen, Sivart often wrote, and the other worst thing.

  Shoulder to shoulder the two approached, leaning toward each other with every step. It was said that the Rooks had once been conjoined, but were separated in a
n experimental operation that left them with crippled feet—Jasper’s left and Josiah’s right. Each wore two sizes of boots, the smaller on the side of that irrevocable severance. This was the only sure way to tell them apart.

  The twins stood over the table with their backs to Unwin, obscuring his view of the men seated there. He felt a great heat coming off the two, drying the back of his neck. It was as though they had just come out of a boiler room.

  “My brother,” said one in a measured tone, “has advised me to advise you to leave now. And since I always take my brother’s advice, I am hereby advising you to leave.”

  “Yeah, who’s asking?” said the man who had told the story.

  “In point of fact,” said the other, in a voice that was deeper but otherwise identical to his brother’s, “my brother is not asking, he is advising.”

  “Well, I don’t know your brother,” said the man with the story, “so I don’t think I’ll take his advice.”

  In the silence that followed, it seemed to Unwin that even the dead in their graves, just behind the wall where the mirror was hung, were waiting to hear what would happen.

  One of the twins licked the tips of his thumb and forefinger and leaned over the table. He pinched the candle flame, and it went out with a hiss. From the dark of the booth came a muffled cry. Then the two men walked to the door with the storyteller between them, his feet kicking wildly a few inches above the ground. They deposited him outside, facedown in the puddle over the slow drain. He lay slumped amid the floating cigarette butts and did not try to pick his face up out of the puddle.