The brothers returned to the back of the room. One chalked his cue stick while the other considered the table. He took his next shot, sinking one ball, then another.
The man still in the booth blinked, his eyes not yet adjusted to the change in light. He put his hat on and went outside. After a moment’s hesitation and a glance back into the bar, he lifted his friend out of the puddle and dragged him up the stairs.
Zlatari came out from behind the curtain, muttering as he went to close the door. Once he was back behind the bar, he uncorked the bottle in his hand and slid it across to Unwin.
The two men at the back of the room had finished their game, and were seating themselves side by side at the booth nearest the pool table. One of them nodded at Zlatari, and Zlatari raised his hand and said, “Yes, Jasper, just a moment.”
Eight years had passed since the names Jasper and Josiah Rook had appeared in Sivart’s reports—like Hoffmann, the twins had gone into hiding following the events of The Man Who Stole November Twelfth. There were times when Unwin had hoped to see them come back—but only on paper, not in the flesh.
“Well,” Zlatari said to him, “it’s your lucky day. We’re about to play some poker, and we need a fourth.”
Unwin raised one hand and said, “Thank you, no. I’m not very good at cards.”
Josiah whispered something into Jasper’s ear—it was Josiah, according to Sivart’s reports, who served as counsel, while Jasper was generally spokesman. The latter called to Unwin, “My brother has advised me to advise you to join us.”
Unwin knew enough to know he had no choice. He took his bottle and followed Zlatari to the table, seating himself at the gravedigger’s right. The Rooks regarded him unblinkingly. Their long faces, molded as though from the same mottled clay, could have been lifeless masks if not for the small green eyes set in them. Those eyes were very much alive, and greedy—they caught the light and did not let it go.
Zlatari dealt the cards, and Unwin said, “I’m afraid I don’t have much money.”
“Your money is no good here,” said Josiah, and Jasper said, “To clarify, my brother does not mean that you play for free, as the expression may commonly be interpreted. Only that we do not play for money, and thus yours is literally of no value at this table.”
Zlatari whistled and shook his head. “Don’t let Humpty and Dumpty here spook you, tight-lips. That’s just their version of gentlemanly charm. Mine is traditional generosity. The bank will forward you something to start with. And like he said, we don’t play for money at this table. We play for questions.”
“Or rather,” said Jasper, “for the right to ask them. But only one question per hand, and only the winner of that hand may ask.”
Unwin did know a thing or two about poker. He knew that certain combinations of cards were better than others, though he could not say for sure which beat which. He would have to rely on poker-facedness, then, which he knew to be a virtue in the context of the game.
“Ante is one interrogative,” said Zlatari.
Unwin placed a white chip beside the others on the table and examined his cards. Four of the five were face cards. When his turn came, he raised the bet by one query, though under the guise of hesitancy. Then he traded in his single non-face card and received another face card, a king, in its place. A handful of royalty, then. What could be better? Minding his poker face, however, he made sure to frown at his hand.
There ensued a whirl of bets, calls, and folds, until finally only Unwin and Josiah were still in the game. Josiah set his cards on the table, and Jasper said for him, “Two pair.”
Unwin revealed his own cards, hoping that someone would interpret.
“Three kings,” Zlatari said. “Tight-lips takes the pot and keeps his nickname for now.”
Unwin tried not to look pleased as he claimed the pile of chips. “I may ask my question now?”
“Sure,” said Zlatari. He seemed cheerful at the Rook brothers’ loss.
“But you just asked it,” said Josiah, “and now you are down one query.” As he said this, he blinked for the first time since they had started playing, though it was less a blink than a deliberate closing and reopening of the eyes.
“Shouldn’t you have told me the rules before we started?” Unwin said.
“The laws of the land are not read to us in the crib,” was Josiah’s reply. “And you just expended another query, though you are allowed only one.”
“It was rhetorical,” said Unwin, but he tossed aside the two chips anyway.
Zlatari said, “Hell, we should be fair to the new guy,” and he told Unwin how to trade up: two queries for a single inquiry, two inquiries for a perscrutation, two perscrutations for a catechism, two catechisms for an interrogation, and so on.
Unwin’s next hand did not look to him as strong as the first, and he folded early, assuring himself there were better cards to come. Worse hands followed, however, and the other players directed their questions at one another, ignoring him. He listened carefully to their answers, but they were of little use because he hardly understood the questions. He heard names he did not recognize, references to “jobs” that were “pulled” rather than worked, and a lot of talk that sounded more like code than speech.
Zlatari asked, “Would putting the hat on the uptown bromides win dirt or be a fishing expedition?”
“A few rounds of muck could show ghost,” was Josiah’s reply.
At the end of the next hand, it was Jasper who threw in enough chips for a perscrutation and said to Zlatari, “Tell me about the last time you saw Sivart.”
Zlatari shifted in his seat and scratched the back of his neck with grimy fingernails. “Well, let’s see, that would have been a week ago. It was dark when he got here, and he did a lot of things he doesn’t usually do. He was nervous, fidgety. He didn’t ask me any questions, just took a seat in the corner and read a book. I didn’t know the man could read. He stayed until his candle burned down, then left.”
The Rooks appeared dissatisfied with the account. Apparently a perscrutation was a rather weightier kind of question and required a more thorough disclosure. Zlatari drew a breath and went on. “He said I might not see him again for a while. He said that Cleo was back in town, that he had to go and find her.” Zlatari glanced at Unwin when he said this, as though to see if it meant anything to him. Unwin looked down at his chips.
Cleo could only be Cleopatra Greenwood, and Unwin had long ago come to fear—even loathe—the appearance of her name in a report. She had first come to the city with Caligari’s Traveling Carnival and for years was one of Sivart’s chief informants. But to file anything regarding her motives or aims was to risk the grueling work of retraction a month later. Mysteries, in her wake, doubled back on themselves and became something else, something a person could drown in. I had her all wrong, clerk: how many times had Unwin come upon that awful admission and scurried to fix what had come before?
The others were waiting for Unwin’s next bet. His winnings were largely depleted, so he traded an inquiry for two queries but quickly lost both. The Rooks, as though sensing that Unwin would soon leave the table, turned their attention on him. Jasper used a query to learn his name, and Josiah spent an inquiry to ask what kind of work he did.
Unwin showed them his badge, and the Rook brothers blinked in tandem.
Zlatari’s brow wrinkled behind his question-mark curl. “Well,” he said, “it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had an Eye at my table. Detective Unwin, is it? Fine. Everyone’s welcome here.” But on this last point he seemed uncertain.
Unwin lost and lost again. All the questions came to him now, and he gave up answers one after another. His opponents were disappointed at the spottiness of his knowledge, though Zlatari licked his lips when Unwin told what he knew about Lamech’s murder, about the bulky corpse at the desk on the thirty-sixth floor, its bulging eyes, its crisscrossed fingers.
Zlatari dealt new hands, and Unwin’s was unremarkable: no face cards, no two
or three of any kind. His beginner’s luck had run out. This would be his last hand, and he had learned so little.
Zlatari folded almost immediately, but the Rook brothers showed no sign of relenting. They eagerly took up their new cards and just as eagerly counted out their bets. Unwin was going to lose. So he said to Zlatari, “A two, three, four, five, and six of spades: is that a good hand?”
Again that slow, sleepy blink from the twins.
“Yes,” said Zlatari. “That is a good hand.”
The brothers tossed their cards onto the table.
Unwin set his own cards facedown and collected his winnings, quickly, so they would not notice how his hands were shaking. He traded in all his chips, which was enough, Zlatari told him, for the most severe sort of question the game allowed. The inquisition would be answered by everyone at the table.
Unwin looked at each of them carefully. The Rooks were silent, imperious. But their questions had revealed that they, like him, were looking for Sivart. And Sivart was looking for Greenwood. So Unwin cleared his throat and asked, “Where is Cleopatra Greenwood?”
Zlatari looked over his shoulders, as though to make sure no one else had heard, even though the bar was otherwise empty. “Hell!” he said. “Hot stinking hell! You want to bury me, Detective? You want us in the dirt today? What’s your game, Charles?”
Josiah whispered something in Jasper’s ear, and Jasper said, “Those questions are out of turn, Zlatari. You’re breaking your own rules.”
“I’ll break more,” Zlatari said. He flicked his hands at Unwin. “Up, let me up!”
Unwin got to his feet, and Zlatari shoved past, knocking chips off the table and onto the floor. “You get your answers from them,” he said, “but I don’t want to know what they are. I’ve got enough graves to dig without having to dig my own.” He went muttering to the farthest table and sat facing the door, twisting his mustache between thumb and forefinger.
The Rooks were still in their seats. Unwin sat back down and tried not to look directly at those green, unblinking eyes. He felt again the strange heat of the two men, dry and suffocating. It came over the table in waves; his face felt like paper about to catch.
Jasper took a card from his jacket pocket. Josiah gave him a pen, and Jasper wrote something and slid the card across the table.
Unwin’s nose tingled with the scent of matchsticks as he read what Jasper had written: The Gilbert, Room 202.
Without having to look, he knew it was the same address written on the piece of notepaper in his pocket. Unwin had already met Cleo Greenwood, then. She had called herself Vera Truesdale and told him a story about roses in her hotel room.
He put the card in his pocket and stood up. He had asked only one question, and the Rooks had answered it—was he not entitled to a second, since there were two of them at the table? There were plenty of questions on his mind: about the identity of the corpse in the Municipal Museum, the meaning of Cleopatra Greenwood’s visit to the Agency that morning, whether any of it meant that Enoch Hoffmann had come out of hiding. But the Rooks were looking at him in a way that suggested their business was concluded, so he stood and gathered his things.
At the door Zlatari grabbed his arm and said, “The price of some questions is the answer, Detective.” He glanced back at the Rooks, and Unwin followed his gaze. They might as well have been a pair of statues, the original and a copy, though no one could have said which was which.
“I suppose you saw Cleo Greenwood since she got back to town,” Zlatari said. “Heard her singing at some joint a little classier than this one. Maybe she looked at you from across the room. Time stopped when you heard her voice. You’d do anything for her, anything she asked, if only she asked. Am I right? Or maybe you imagined all that. Try to convince yourself that you imagined all that, Detective. Try to forget.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ll always be wrong about her.”
Unwin put on his hat. He would have liked to forget, forget everything that had happened since he woke up this morning, forget even the dream of Sivart. Maybe someday Edwin Moore could teach him how it was done. In the meantime he had to keep moving.
He went to the door and hopped over the puddle on his way up the stairs. The Rooks’ red steam truck was parked down the street—he was surprised he had failed to notice it before. It was just as the cleaning lady at the Municipal Museum had described it all those years ago: red and hunched and brutal-looking. Had he fallen into his files, or had his files spilled into his life?
He hurried to his bicycle, wanting to be as far from the Forty Winks as possible by the time the Rooks understood the extent of his poker-facedness. When they flipped over his last hand, they would see various numbered cards there, none of them concurrent, and of four different suits.
SEVEN
On Suspects
They will present themselves to you first as victims, as
allies, as eyewitnesses. Nothing should be more suspicious
to the detective than the cry for help, the helping
hand, or the helpless onlooker. Only if someone
has behaved suspiciously should you allow
for the possibility of his innocence.
An empty hat and raincoat floated at the center of the diagram in Unwin’s mind. Beside them was a dress filled with smoke. A pair of black birds with black hats fluttered above, while below lay two corpses, one in an office chair, one encased in glass. The diagram was a fairy tale, written by a forgetful old man with wild white hair, and it whirled like a record on a phonograph.
The rain fell heavily again, and Unwin pedaled against the wind. These were unfamiliar streets, where unfamiliar faces glared with seeming menace from beneath dripping hats. A small dog, white with apricot patches, emerged from an alley and followed him, barking at his rear tire. No amount of bell ringing could drive it away. When it rained like this, these city dogs were always lost, always wandering—the smells they used to navigate were washed into the gutters. Unwin felt he was a bit like one of those dogs now. This one finally left him to investigate a sodden pile of trash at the corner, but once it was gone, he found that he missed it.
His umbrella technique worked best over short distances and at reasonably high speeds. Now he was soaked. His sleeves drooped from his wrists, and his tie stuck to him through his shirt. If she saw him like this, Cleopatra Greenwood would laugh and send him on his way. That she knew something was a certainty—she always knew something, was always “in on it.” But what was she in on? Why had she come back to the city now?
Even after all his work at maintaining consistency, Unwin knew that a careful examination of the Agency’s files would reveal perhaps a dozen versions of Cleopatra Greenwood, each a little different from the others. One of them, at the age of seventeen, renounced her claim on her family’s textile fortune and ran off to join Caligari’s Traveling Carnival. The carnival, in the autumn of its misfit life and haunted by odd beauties and ill-used splendors, made of the girl a sort of queen. She read futures in a deck of old cards and suffered a man with a handlebar mustache to throw daggers at her.
During one performance a blade pierced her left leg, just above the knee. She removed the dagger herself and kept it. The wound left her with a permanent limp, and the blade would appear again in many of Sivart’s reports. When she found him in the cargo hold of The Wonderly, that night out on the bay, it was already in her hand.
I’d been trying to remember something I’d read about escaping from bonds, Sivart wrote. It’s easier if you’re able to dislocate certain bones at will, but that’s not in my job description. I was about as useful as a jack-in-the-box with his lid glued shut. So I was happy to see her, even though I didn’t know what she was doing there.
“I’m going to help you get what you came for,” she said. “And you’re going to get me out of here.”
So she was in trouble, too. She was always in trouble. I wanted to tell her she could do better than old twiddle-fingers back the
re, but I still needed her to cut those ropes, so I played nice and kept it to myself.
We found the crate with Mr. Grim inside and carried it to a lifeboat. It was tough going, she with her limp and me with sore feet, but with a pair of ropes to lower them we managed to get corpse and crate down onto the dinghy. She sat at the prow and rubbed her bad knee while I rowed. It was dark out there on the water, no moon, no stars, and I could barely see the seven feet to her face. She wouldn’t tell me where she would go after this. She wouldn’t tell me where I could find her. Truth is, I still don’t know where she stands. With Hoffmann? With us? She seems like a good kid, clerk, and I want to trust her. But maybe I’m getting her wrong.
For years, over the course of dozens of cases, Sivart was never sure whose side she was on, and neither was Unwin, until the theft of November twelfth, when Sivart caught her red-handed and did what he had to do.
If what Edwin Moore had said was correct, then it might have been Greenwood who made the switch that night and tricked Sivart into returning the wrong corpse to the museum. And if Sivart had failed to get the truth out of her, what hope did Unwin have? He was no threat to her; he was nothing at all: DETECTIVE CHARLES UN, as it said on his office door.
Ahead of him a black car rolled from an alleyway, blocking his route. Unwin braked and waited. No traffic prevented the car from taking to the street, but it stayed where it was. He tried to look in at the driver; all he could see was his own reflection in the window. The engine let out a low growl.
What would the Manual have to say about this? Clearly, Unwin was meant to be intimidated. Should he pretend that he was not? Act as though this were all a misunderstanding, that he was only a little embarrassed by so awkward an encounter? No such cordiality was forthcoming from the driver of the vehicle, so he dismounted and walked his bicycle to the opposite side of the street.